Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 12, Issue 1, 1998

Abstract. Various studies have indicated that the aspectual class controls the narrative temporal structure. In principle, sentences with a bound/perfcctive interpretation advance time in narrative. For example, a sentence with either an achievement or an accomplishment predicate does not overlap with surrounding discourse and, therefore, it is interpreted as a description of an event that happens later than the event described in the previous sentence. However, it has also been pointed out that the progressive aspect in English moves time forward in the narrative. Dowry (1986) provides examples in the progressive aspect that alllow time advancement. He argues that in such exceptional cases, a quasi-inceptive reading is possible through "perceptual observations". The present paper examimes the progressive construction in Japanese, which involves the stativc suffix te-iru. The aim of this study is to show that the progressive aspect in Japanese also brings about a perceptual effect under certain conditions, which induces a boundedness reading of the sentence with a predicate in the progressive aspect.

Abstract. This paper focuses on progressive aspect. Definitions of the progressive in various formal semantics frameworks, concerned essentially with the English be + V-ing form, provide a picture of the progressive as a single aspectual notion, a sort of universal primitive. Languages such as Spanish and others in the Romance family that have two progressive forms, one built with the verb of motion ir 'to go*, challenge the notion of a unique progressive perspective. We examine the semantics of the linear progressive form ir + gerund and contrast it with estar + gerund, not only with respect to truth conditions but also with respect to the lexical and contexual aspects that make ir + gerund better suited to describe certain situations. We introduce the notion of perspective in loose analogy with Asher (1992) and argue that the linear progressive describes more adequately those perspectives that select the asymmetries in an event. This observation is accounted for by the asymmetry inherent in the linear progressive relation, since the period of time for which the progressive is true is a sequence T = {tj < tj < ...

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Abstract. This paper deals wilh the use of Ihe passé simple and the imparfait of French in frequentative sentences. It is argued that frequency implies sentence-internal quantification, meaning that frequentative sentences report just one (complex) eventuality. This claim is related to the fact that, as far as establishing temporal relationships between eventualities is concerned, sentences containing frequency adverbs behave like sentences that don't imply quantification at all. So they may establish all kinds of temporal relationships between eventualities. Given the claims put forward in this paper about the temporal meaning of the passe* simple and the imparfait (Molendijk 1990), it naturally follows that, as a general rule, frequency adverbs combine with both tenses. But they do not always do so under exactly the same circumstances. In this regard, a distinction can be made between dependent frequency adverbs {tout le temps 'all the time' etc.), which imply reference to a contextually determinable concrete situation, and independent ones (toujours 'always', etc.), which may be used without any reference to such a situation. This distinction helps us to understand, for instance, why dependent frequency adverbs do not easily combine with the 'absolute' (non-narrative) passe simple, whereas they do combine with the imparfait and the 'narrative' passé simple.

Abstract. In this paper two paradigms of four Dutch adverbials are discussed, the first consisting of al ('already'), al niet meer ('already no longer'), nog altijd ('still always'), and nog altijd niet ('still always not'), the second of eindelijk ('finally'), eindelijk niet meer ('finally no longer'), al bijna ('already almost') and al bijna niet meer ('already almost no longer'). These are expressions of aspectual focus in that the actual course of events is inherently opposed to possible alternatives and evaluated as slower or faster than expected. A two-dimensional graphical representation is provided for each adverbial. The relationships between the eight representations are captured in terms of five binary parameters. Each adverbial thus corresponds to a bit-string of five binary values. The various relations of opposition or negation between these eight adverbials are then defined in terms of switching bit-values. The proposed analysis rejects the duality-relationship posited between al ('already') and nog ('still'). Together with nog niet ('not yet') and niet meer ('no longer') the latter constitutes an independent paradigm of continuity-expressions fundamentally different from the focus-paradigms around al. Furthermore, basic duality notions of internal and external negation are insufficient to adequately capture the various types of negation involved in aspectual focus.

Abstract Resultative predicates have the aspectual effect of telicizing an atelic activity verb. The function of the postverbal constituent in accomplishments has been taken to be one of providing an end point to the activity, or of a constituent that "measures out" the event denoted by the activity verb. In either case, it delimits the event by providing it with boundaries. Looking at resultative predicates, we observe that they are subject to the requirement that they denote a bounded scale. This requirement is argued to be empirically superior to an alternative restriction stating that the resultative must be a stage-level predicate. The boundedness requirement furthermore provides direct evidence against an approach that treats the resultative as an end point, and supports the claim that it is an event measure. One piece of evidence concerns the 'make + NP+Adjective' construction, in which the adjective denotes the final stage or end point in a change of state, exactly as in the resultative construction. In contrast to the resultative, however, the adjective can be unbounded, as it is not an event measure in this case. We argue that the boundedness requirement on resultative predicates follows directly from treating it as an event measure, since a measure must be bounded as a matter of conceptual necessity.

Abstract. It has been often emphasized that, in Romance, the category of aspect has become subordinated to the category of tense and that the development of compound and double-compound forms was due to the necessity of recreating the opposition between perfectum and infectum, an opposition which dominated the Latin temporal system on the whole. As far as we know, there is no satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon. According to our hypothesis, the cyclic bleaching of the 'resultative value' is a consequence of a fundamental change in parameters affecting various categories such as gender, case, voice and tense. More specifically, the resultative value of compound tenses must have been in competition with the values of the newly created plain passive, which was also result-centered (as opposed to the agent-centered active and event-centered middle/reflexive). By turn, these changes in the voice paradigm were triggered by the reinterpretation of the inherent feature [+Passive] characterizing Latin neuter nouns as a contextual feature. Since the verb assigns various roles to its arguments, it is no wonder that the combination of 'topicality' with a 'passive role' will affect the entire sentential structure, including the verb markers. But if both the plain passive and the compound past are result-centered, the corresponding active forms may become first and foremost tense markers, with special pragmatic and narrative values as required by the discourse necessities of the predominantly oral registers that developed into Romance languages.

Abstract. The French Passé Composé (PC) has long been a source of interest to scholars, in particular in relation to the Passé Simple, which it is seen to have replaced to some extent. The English Present Perfect (PP) has also aroused much interest for its wide range of functions, and apparent emerging use in Simple Past contexts. The aim of the present paper is to examine the PC and PP in a comparative manner. The focus will be on the use of PP and PC in a particular narrative context: faits divers (and other short articles) in French newspapers, and its closest equivalent in the British press: news in brief. Finally, we consider how far the PP has moved along the path trodden by the PC, i.e. to what extent perfect forms can express past events.

Abstract. This paper reports on a research in progress on the aspectual opposition between two major stems of verbal inflection in Ancient Greek: Present and Aorist. By studying a corpus of forms taken from Plato's philosophical dialogues, we try to elucidate the relationship between the choice of an aspectual stem and the meaning of the verb in the situation of utterance. Our selected items are verbal forms used to invite the addressee to speak. The Invitation to speak is a connection between two consecutive utterance situations; it pragmatically implies a specific way of causing the addressee to act. Through a detailed analysis of the part played by non-inflectional person markers (stressed pronouns as opposed to simple endings), connective particles and adverbials, it appears that Aorist is used when the agent seems to be presented as opposed to another one and the process is presented as interrupted, whereas Present is used in the case of continuation or resumption of the speech process. Focus is preferably put on one of the actants, to mark the opposition and newness of the Aorist process, whereas putting the emphasis on a continuing process requires the Present stem.

Abstract. This article sets out some of the results of wider research on the linguistic databases of a natural language generation system. One of the necessary steps in the building of such databases is to determine the linguistic means the generator must have in order to produce a linguistic form that corresponds to the semantic representation given as an input. We wish to focus here on the theoretical choices and issues rather than on the application itself. We assume that texts have a syntactic structure, whose characteristics are partly comparable to the syntactic structure of a sentence, and that a connective can be considered as a textual predicate which has arguments that are constrained in the same way as the arguments of a verb. This article will concentrate more specifically on one particular semantic relation — the simultaneity of two events — and will show how the taxonomy of the associated connectives can be elaborated. Finally, we will set out some of the major developments of this research, which concern the interface between conceptual and linguistic knowledge.

Abstract. Various interpretations are available for when -clauses featuring present-tense verb forms: the clause may refer either to a past or future time-sphere, or to a world other than the "real" one. The reference may also be widened to a generic value, or processed as a nontemporal locus. Whether the interpretation is temporal or nontemporal, the reference value can never be strictly limited to to, or temporal zero-point. This paper explores the temporal properties of t0 and the construction of temporal and nontemporal loci. It is shown that although the temporal locus constructed by when is incompatible with t0, such is not the case for as. The incompatibility is therefore accounted for in terms of when's role as a particular kind of aspectualizer: indeed, all the examples tend to show that when imparts a perfective format to the locus constructed on the basis of the w/ien-clause situation.

Abstract. This article assumes that tenses in English and Dutch are non-time-based. A verb in the present tense form signals 'verb-in-this-context-of-situation', whereas a verb in the past tense form signals 'verb-in-that-context-of-situation'. It is argued here that the non-time-based analysis of tenses is particularly relevant in cases in which two tense forms should indicate the same time, but have to be interpreted as indicating different times. This discrepancy may occur in the relative use of tenses in various languages (e.g. Classical Greek, Old Irish, Ngiti, and Russian).